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Simultaneous Shows, One Indoors, One Out

Still without a permanent home in Manhattan and with spring fast approaching, the Dia Art Foundation has cooked up a way to lure audiences to its museum on the Hudson River in Beacon, N.Y., while also paying homage to its past.

It has teamed up with Montclair State University in New Jersey, which presents the Peak Performances series, and has commissioned the 75-year-old artist Robert Whitman to create a theater piece that will be shown simultaneously outdoors at Riverfront Park near Dia:Beacon and indoors at the university’s Alexander Kasser Theater in Montclair, N.J. Mr. Whitman, a multimedia experimenter who has enjoyed a long relationship with Dia, made a reputation for himself in the early 1960s, along with Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, Red Grooms and Robert Watts, by staging happenings, those fleeting performances that are considered classics of the genre today.

The new work, “Passport,” will be shown on April 16 and 17. (Tickets are available through diabeacon .org.) Mr. Whitman described the piece in a statement as “nonverbal theater, using a vocabulary of space, rhythm, scale and formal plastic elements that communicate the image without words.”

As in the past, Mr. Whitman has collaborated with engineers and scientists to create images that use live action, props, sound and video. Each location will show something different. In Beacon he will incorporate the surrounding environment. A burning boat will float down the Hudson, and the sound of a passing Metro-North train will be heard. In Montclair colored liquid will spew from a volcano. The images will be transmitted live from one location to the other via video, so all together, about 600 people can see the work.

“Bob Whitman is part of our DNA,” said Philippe Vergne, Dia’s director. “Performance has been a long part of Dia’s history.” And while veterans might be familiar with Mr. Whitman’s work, Mr. Vergne said that by presenting this new performance he hoped that “young people will understand his history too.”

As Elisabeth, a 52-year-old rabbi from Newton, Mass., perused more than 2,000 photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, she had a specific mandate: select just one that particularly caught her eye.

“I didn’t expect to choose this image,” she wrote in a statement explaining her choice: a naked portrait of Patti Smith from 1976, her knees pressed to her chest. “I did not expect to choose a recognizable face.”

Sean Kelly, who owns the Chelsea gallery that bears his name, was also surprised. He was curious to see if reaction to Mapplethorpe’s work had changed since 1989, when the Corcoran Gallery in Washington canceled an exhibition of his work because of concerns that Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic and sadomasochistic imagery would lead to a backlash against the National Endowment for the Arts, which had provided partial financing.

So Mr. Kelly challenged himself to organize a show that was, as he put it, “a demographic snapshot through Robert’s lens, literally.” He asked 50 random people, one from every state, to each select one photograph.

“There were caveats,” Mr. Kelly explained. “It couldn’t be anyone we knew, and no relatives.”

Photo

“Embrace” (1982) is part of “Robert Mapplethorpe: 50 Americans,” to open in May at the Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea.Credit
Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

His gallery began conducting demographic research, studying census data on state populations, economies and religious makeup. Gallery staff members talked to friends, and advertised on Craigslist and Facebook, to come up with 50 people (none under 21), ranging from a 23-year-old math teacher in Oklahoma to a 106-year-old retired farmer in Vermont. Each participant was given a password and a couple of weeks to study the images on a private area of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation’s Web site.

Their choices make up “Robert Mapplethorpe: 50 Americans,” a show at Mr. Kelly’s gallery from May 6 through June 25. Alongside the photos will be participants’ explanations of their decisions. (All those taking part are identified by first name only.)

“Nobody made safe choices,” Mr. Kelly said. “The images were not at all what you would predict. We were concerned that we could get 50 famous images or lots of shots of flowers.” Instead, he said, some picks were “incredibly personal,” like that of a Wyoming rancher who had been mauled by a bear. He chose a photo of Lisa Lyon, Mapplethorpe’s friend and model, with a tiger, because the animal reminded him of his fiercely protective dogs.

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Other selections were more interpretive, like that of a Michigan woman who chose “Embrace,” a shot of a black man and a white man hugging, because, she wrote, “I see comfort, hope and hopelessness all in one.”

A LENS ON AMERICA

In the early 1980s the shipping company Consolidated Freightways put together a photography collection for its headquarters, then in Palo Alto, Calif. Not surprisingly, many of the images captured the American landscape — a highway in New Mexico; a sunrise in Nevada; a plantation in Mississippi — all sights the company’s truckers might encounter on any given day.

Consolidated Freightways filed for bankruptcy protection in 2002, but its parent company, Con-way, retained the photographs. And now, because it is moving its headquarters to Ann Arbor, Mich., Con-way has decided to auction off the images.

“The art collection was from a different time in the company’s history,” said Gary Frantz, a Con-way spokesman. “Rather than move the art, the company thought it was a good time to sell it.”

On April 7 Christie’s plans to auction a group of photos in New York. (Another group will be sold in New York in December.)

“This is one of the early corporate collections to focus on photography and with a specific theme,” said Joshua Holdeman, international director of Christie’s photography department. “These photographs were so cheap then, it was an easy way for a corporation to put together a large collection.”

But now many of the images — works by the likes of Ansel Adams and Hiroshi Sugimoto; Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans; Robert Mapplethorpe, William Eggleston and Bernd and Hilla Becher — are highly sought after by collectors willing to pay hefty sums. The entire collection is expected to bring more than $1.5 million.

Among the highlights is Mapplethorpe’s “Flag,” from 1987, which is estimated at $70,000 to $90,000, and Robert Frank’s “U.S. 285, New Mexico,” from 1956 ($50,000 to $70,000).

A version of this article appears in print on March 18, 2011, on Page C26 of the New York edition with the headline: Simultaneous Shows,
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